@inproceedings{schulder:24034:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Schulder, Marc and Bigeard, Sam and Kopf, Maria and Hanke, Thomas and Kuder, Anna and W{\'o}jcicka, Joanna and Mesch, Johanna and Bj{\"o}rkstrand, Thomas and Vacalopoulou, Anna and Vasilaki, Kyriaki and Goulas, Theodoros and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Efthimiou, Eleni}, title = {Signs and Synonymity: Continuing Development of the {Multilingual} {Sign} {Language} {Wordnet}}, pages = {343--353}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC-COLING} 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources}, maintitle = {2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC-COLING} 2024)}, publisher = {{ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL)}}, address = {Torino, Italy}, day = {25}, month = may, year = {2024}, isbn = {978-2-493814-30-2}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24034.html}, doi = {10.63317/4mvt6a6nhif3}, abstract = {The Multilingual Sign Language Wordnet is the first publicly available wordnet resource for sign languages. It is a growing multilingual resource providing data for eight sign languages to date. During the initial phase of its creation, the focus lay on producing the infrastructure to support various languages and to produce initial sets of content for them. This article represents the start of the second phase, in which the focus is moved to establishing overlapping coverage across the different sign languages. Building on the data produced so far, a new feature to assist annotation is introduced which leverages established partial synonymy between signs (inter- and cross-lingually) to discover likely additional synonymies. Other improvements to the annotation interface and workflow build directly on the experiences from the first phase. Working with the updated annotation interface, new data is produced for Polish Sign Language, Greek Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language.} } @inproceedings{bigeard:22036:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Bigeard, Sam and Schulder, Marc and Kopf, Maria and Hanke, Thomas and Vasilaki, Kyriaki and Vacalopoulou, Anna and Goulas, Theodoros and Dimou, Athanasia-Lida and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Efthimiou, Eleni}, title = {Introducing Sign Languages to a Multilingual Wordnet: Bootstrapping Corpora and Lexical Resources of {Greek} {Sign} {Language} and {German} {Sign} {Language}}, pages = {9--15}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2022} 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources}, maintitle = {13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2022)}, publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}}, address = {Marseille, France}, day = {25}, month = jun, year = {2022}, isbn = {979-10-95546-86-3}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/22036.html}, doi = {10.63317/4rue6p9a97i7}, abstract = {Wordnets have been a popular lexical resource type for many years. Their sense-based representation of lexical items and numerous relation structures have been used for a variety of computational and linguistic applications. The inclusion of different wordnets into multilingual wordnet networks has further extended their use into the realm of cross-lingual research. Wordnets have been released for many spoken languages. Research has also been carried out into the creation of wordnets for several sign languages, but none have yet resulted in publicly available datasets. This article presents our own efforts towards an inclusion of sign languages in a multilingual wordnet, starting with Greek Sign Language (GSL) and German Sign Language (DGS). Based on differences in available language resources between GSL and DGS, we trial two workflows with different coverage priorities. We also explore how synergies between both workflows can be leveraged and how future work on additional sign languages could profit from building on existing sign language wordnet data. The results of our work are made publicly available.} } @inproceedings{efthimiou:18043:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Vasilaki, Kyriaki and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Vacalopoulou, Anna and Goulas, Theodoros and Dimou, Athanasia-Lida}, title = {The {POLYTROPON} Parallel Corpus}, pages = {39--44}, editor = {Bono, Mayumi and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna and Osugi, Yutaka}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2018} 8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the Language Community}, maintitle = {11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2018)}, publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, day = {12}, month = may, year = {2018}, isbn = {979-10-95546-01-6}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/18043.html}, abstract = {Here we present the POLYTROPON parallel corpus for the language pair Greek Sign Language (GSL) -- Greek, which is created and annotated aiming to serve as a golden corpus available to the community of SL technologies for experimentation with various approaches to SL processing, focusing on machine learning for SL recognition, machine translation (MT) and information retrieval. The corpus volume incorporates 3653 clauses in three repetitions each, captured in front view by means of one HD and one kinect camera. Corpus annotation has allowed to extract initial features sets with the aim to reach a GSL level of abstraction close to the one currently available for Greek language representations, exploiting the inherent characteristics of the language in view of applying initial deep learning experiments on GSL data, where both words and signs may be represented as vectors of characteristics which allow dependency tree structure representations of input text and signed clauses as those created by the use of Tree Editor TrEd 2.0.} } @inproceedings{efthimiou:16003:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Dimou, Athanasia-Lida and Goulas, Theodoros and Karioris, Panagiotis and Vasilaki, Kyriaki and Vacalopoulou, Anna and Pissaris, Michalis}, title = {From a Sign Lexical Database to an {SL} Golden Corpus -- the {POLYTROPON} {SL} Resource}, pages = {63--68}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2016} 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus Mining}, maintitle = {10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2016)}, publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}}, address = {Portoro{\v z}, Slovenia}, day = {28}, month = may, year = {2016}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16003.html}, abstract = {The POLYTROPON lexicon resource is being created in an attempt i) to gather and recapture already available lexical resources of Greek Sign Language (GSL) in an up-to-date homogeneous manner, ii) to enrich these resources with new lemmas, and iii) to end up with a multipurpose-multiuse resource which can be equally exploited in end user oriented educational/communication services and in supporting various SL technologies. The database that hosts the newly acquired resource, incorporates various SL oriented fields of information, including information on compounding, GSL synonyms, classifier qualities, lemma related senses, semantic groupings etc, and also lemma coding for their manual and non-manual articulation activity. It also provides linking of GSL and Modern Greek equivalent(s) lemma pairs to serve bilingual use purposes. A by-product of considerable value is the parallel corpus which derived from the GSL examples of use accompanying each lemma entry in the dictionary and their translations into Modern Greek. The annotation of the corpus for the entailed signs and assignment of respective glosses in combination with data capturing by both HD and Kinect cameras in three repetitions, allowed for the creation of a golden parallel corpus available to the community of SL technologies for experimentation with various approaches to SL recognition, MT and information retrieval.} } @inproceedings{efthimiou:04010:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Vacalopoulou, Anna and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Steinhauer, Gregory}, title = {Multipurpose Design and Creation of {GSL} Dictionaries}, pages = {51--58}, editor = {Streiter, Oliver and Vettori, Chiara}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2004} Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: From {SignWriting} to Image Processing. Information techniques and their implications for teaching, documentation and communication}, maintitle = {4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2004)}, publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}}, address = {Lisbon, Portugal}, day = {30}, month = may, year = {2004}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/04010.html}, abstract = {In this paper we present the methodology of data collection and implementation of databases with the purpose to create extensive lexical and terminological resources for the Greek Sign Language (GSL). The focus is on issues of linguistic content validation, multipurpose design and reusability of resources, exemplified by the multimedia dictionary products of the projects NOEMA (1999- 2001) and PROKLISI (2002-2004). As far as data collection methodology, DB design and resources development are concerned, a clear distinction is made between general language lexical items and terms, since the creation of resources for the two types of data undergoes different methodological principles, lexeme formation and usage conditions. There is also reference to content and interface evaluation mechanisms, as well as to basic linguistic research carried out for the support of lexicographical work.} } @inproceedings{dimou:70021:sltat:lrec, author = {Dimou, Athanasia-Lida and Papavassiliou, Vassilis and McDonald, John C. and Goulas, Theodoros and Vasilaki, Kyriaki and Vacalopoulou, Anna and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Efthimiou, Eleni and Wolfe, Rosalee}, title = {Signing Avatar Performance Evaluation within {EASIER} Project}, pages = {39--44}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and McDonald, John C. and Shterionov, Dimitar and Wolfe, Rosalee}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual: Challenges and Perspectives}, maintitle = {13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2022)}, publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}}, address = {Marseille, France}, day = {24}, month = jun, year = {2022}, isbn = {979-10-95546-82-5}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/2022.sltat-1.6.html}, doi = {10.63317/3xn8c5z3e5px}, abstract = {The direct involvement of deaf users in the development and evaluation of signing avatars is imperative to achieve legibility and raise trust among synthetic signing technology consumers. A paradigm of constructive cooperation between researchers and the deaf community is the EASIER project , where user driven design and technology development have already started producing results. One major goal of the project is the direct involvement of sign language (SL) users at every stage of development of the project's signing avatar. As developers wished to consider every parameter of SL articulation including affect and prosody in developing the EASIER SL representation engine, it was necessary to develop a steady communication channel with a wide public of SL users who may act as evaluators and can provide guidance throughout research steps, both during the project's end-user evaluation cycles and beyond. To this end, we have developed a questionnaire-based methodology, which enables researchers to reach signers of different SL communities on-line and collect their guidance and preferences on all aspects of SL avatar animation that are under study. In this paper, we report on the methodology behind the application of the EASIER evaluation framework for end-user guidance in signing avatar development as it is planned to address signers of four SLs -Greek Sign Language (GSL), French Sign Language (LSF), German Sign Language (DGS) and Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS)- during the first project evaluation cycle. We also briefly report on some interesting findings from the pilot implementation of the questionnaire with content from the Greek Sign Language (GSL).} }